Memory Tests
The memory tests are designed to highlight the general performance of the memory subsystem. The AG8's performance relative to the D925XCV and the AA8 are what we're interested in, comparing two retail Alderwood boards to ABIT's Grantsdale contender running DDR. We use a trio of tests to analyse said performance, Pifast is up first. It's our own custom test to 10M decimal places.Pifast
The AG8 slots in between the AA8 and the D925XCV in terms of absolute performance, but in reality there's very little to choose between them.
Sciencemark 2.0 - Bandwidth
Sciencemark 2.0 measures peak CPU to memory controller bandwidth, the bandwidth available to the CPU for memory intensive tasks. It doesn't take into account any excess bandwidth available on the memory controller, that may or may not be usable by other peripherals.
The AG8 matches the AA8's available bandwidth when using the 3.4 Extreme Edition, however both lag significantly behind the D925XCV by nearly 8%.
Sciencemark 2.0 - Access Latency
Access latency, with the DDR modules at 2-2-2-6 timings, is ahead of the Alderwood boards and even ahead of a tuned Canterwood motherboard that used DDR at the same timings (not shown on the graphs). However all three Intel-based systems lag behind the Athlon FX systems on test.
